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The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

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Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#51

Post by exceptione »

ricardobeat wrote: post #13
jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

Elementary is the OS you're looking for: https://elementary.io I wish it had more adoption. Right now there are not a lot of apps written using it's UI guidelines/framework as most projects are worried about portability and/or have moved to Electron. It is slowly getting better though, and seems to be developing an ecosystem geared towards quality as OSX used to be: https://medium.com/elementaryos/appcenter-spotlight…

I don't get the hype for elementary. It looks like an other gtk-themed os. I swear by Manjaro kde now, it looks gorgeous out of the box.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#52

Post by noobermin »

cbhl wrote: post #9
jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

Control is all of it. Security on Android is a joke for 80%+ of users. They can't run on the latest version of Android, because various vendors' drivers are in out-of-tree kernel patches that are un-upstreamable for non-technical reasons. (By comparison, Chrome OS is also Linux-based, but, IIRC, it requires all shipping devices to have drivers upstreamed.) Owning an OS with a stable device driver ABI would allow Goog…

>Owning an OS with a stable device driver ABI

Are they actually doing that though? I haven't read anything along those lines, not that I have looked at Fuchsia in depth.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#53

Post by noobermin »

openfuture wrote: post #8
jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

Capability based security and microkernel, both pretty substantial differences.

Aside from the microkernel, doesn't Android already do capability based security?

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#54

Post by noobermin »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #22
cbhl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Control is all of it. Security on Android is a joke for 80%+ of users. They can't run on the latest version of Android, because various vendors' drivers are in out-of-tree kernel patches that are un-upstreamable for non-technical reasons. (By comparison, Chrome OS is also Linux-based, but, IIRC, it requires all shipping devices to have drivers upstreamed.) Owning an OS with a stable device driver ABI would allow Goog…

> un-upstreamable for non-technical reasons It was my understanding that it was almost completely technical reason, i.e., vendors write drivers that mostly work but are completely terrible from a quality perspective.

And the same vendors will suddenly write better drivers with a new unfamiliar OS?

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#55

Post by badsectoracula »

CharlesW wrote: post #17
Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One feature that differentiates Linux from other systems is the sheer amount of choice that you get. For example, with Linux I can choose GNOME, KDE, a selection of other desktop environments, or I can choose a simple window manager like twm and sort of roll my own environment. Or maybe I could set my system up so that it runs without a window manager and just gives me a full-screen emacs environment. With Mac OS, fo…

> One feature that differentiates Linux from other systems is the sheer amount of choice that you get. It's a difference but not necessarily a feature if, as a user, you don't have the background to make informed and safe decisions about those choices.

In that case you can simply use a distribution that makes the choice for you. Generally people recommend Ubuntu or Linux Mint here.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#56

Post by badsectoracula »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #30
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not see the contradiction here? If there was only GNOME, then you'd be stuck with GNOME's failings (whether obvious bugs like segfaults, or more subjective failures like their attempts to kill tray icons). Choice and diversity are the strength of *nix.

I think what they were getting at is that instead of the community developing one really great desktop environment they have divided themselves and ended up developing two desktop environments that are merely OK.

This is because someone's great feature is another's broken mess.

For example, i cannot stand vsync anywhere with the only exception being video playback. I want my windows to follow the mouse precisely, not lag behind a few pixels, i want my games to react instantly, not lag a few milliseconds, etc. Yet GNOME, elementaryOS and even Wayland's whole design force it (well, Wayland could be implemented without vsync, but is anyone doing it?).

At the same time you have people complaining about tearing and when they force composition everywhere to fix it, they do not mind (or sometimes, even notice) the lag.

Similarly, i like how X allows composing applications and environments out of individual components (ironically this sort of application composition lends itself to the Unix idea of one app per role, but most modern toolkits ignore that feature so we ended up with almost nothing really supporting it unless you go raw Xlib or ancient toolkits like Xaw or Motif).

Others see it as anathema and the root of all evil (ok, i cannot put some more concrete negatives for this as i cannot comprehend how someone would dislike it, yet i always end up arguing with people - especially GNOME/Gtk+ people /for some reason/ - over at Reddit about it :-P).

There is no way to please everyone, so you have to allow for choices. Or deal with people constantly complaining about their lost choices, that works too i suppose :-P.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#57

Post by kardianos »

jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

I Disagree. I run Linux desktop on all my computers.

I think you don't understand how much Google works to have security from design. Windows, Linux, OS X can all be fine "traditional" desktop systems (though the lack of a unified vision on Linux hurts it incredibly).

I see Fuchsia as a desktop system that (a) has a native, fundamental concept of graphical desktop and (b) has deep sandboxing on a level similar to Chrome, but for the entire OS, meaning -> it could become an all purpose platform for thick client applications that isn't reliant or the web and still unable to be exploited.

I suspect they are not satisfied with any of their desktop options. I doubt this has anything to do with Android or Chrome OS within the next 10 years. They just want a desktop that sucks less and they can guarantee follows their own security practices (not FIPS, but process isolation and capability injection).

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#58

Post by afsina »

noobermin wrote: post #53
openfuture wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capability based security and microkernel, both pretty substantial differences.

Aside from the microkernel, doesn't Android already do capability based security?

I think this is a much lower level thing.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#59

Post by jstarks »

Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #19
jkmcf wrote: post #2

Aside from control, what does this provide over Linux? IMO, the Linux desktop problem is due partially to relying on the antiquated X Windows system, but mostly a lack of funding a good vision, e.g. Unity. After growing up with OpenLook, then Motif, the plethora of Linux window managers, and unhappy years with Windows, I noticed most of the elegant apps were being written for OSX. I’m not sure how much of this is due…

Here’s a list of syscalls: https://github.com/fuchsia-mirror/magenta/blob/master/docs/s...

Interesting. More influence from Windows (NT) than I expected.

Re: The Pixelbook is being used to test Google's Fuchsia OS

#60

Post by badsectoracula »

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #35
mamon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wide choice is actually putting Linux at disadvantage: instead of consolidating efforts to create one decent desktop environment we have half a dozen of half-assed ones. God, I've just recently have to downgrade to Gnome 3.24, because the latest 3.26 version kept crashing with the segfault error few times a day.

It extends beyond desktop environments, that's only the most visible piece. Closely related to desktop environments are the two major UI toolkits. Why does Kate have a different file picker than Gimp? Why does LibreOffice give me yet another file picker? On MacOS and Windows, the file picker is a solved problem. Init systems, until fairly recently when most distributions consolidated around systemd, were in a similar…

> Why does Kate have a different file picker than Gimp? Why does LibreOffice give me yet another file picker? On MacOS and Windows, the file picker is a solved problem.

Because these file pickers are implemented by two different GUI toolkits that have a different idea of how file picking should be done. This isn't anything new, Xaw programs used their own (handmade) file dialogs, Motif had its own, Java/Awt had its own, Java/Swing had its own, etc. Unless you want to force everyone use a single toolkit (which is unrealistic for several reasons) you cannot get the same behavior everywhere.

Note that this isn't specific to Linux, in Windows and probably macOS you get the same unless you stick to applications using only the native APIs and avoid any cross platform application that use Gtk, Qt, Swing or any other toolkit that cannot tie itself to a single native widget library (and TBH even with some applications that do tie themselves to Win32, they sometimes end up implementing their own file pickers anyway).

And of course file pickers tend to be the most shared of GUI elements, when it comes to the actual UIs themselves even in Windows you get a ton of different toolkits, styles, behavior, etc that totally ignore the native look and feel (assuming there is one since Win32, WinForms, WPF and UWP all behave from slightly to totally different from each other, depending which ones you compare).

> In this case, it seems pretty clear that Wayland is the winner and we're just waiting for everything else to catch up.

Wayland is very restrictive for many uses and actually lacks several useful features compared to X11 - some it pushes towards the applications in the stack (so instead of a single solution that is shared among -say- 1000 clients you get 1000 solutions), while other stuff are simply impossible (unless you are XWayland which gets special status, leading to the ironic situation that even under Wayland the X APIs provide you with more functionality :-P).

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